PREFACE
The author of this novel, Babu Peary Chand Mitter, was born in the year 1814.
He represented the well-educated, thoroughly earnest, and courteous Bengali gentleman of the old school.
His life was devoted to the good of his fellow-countrymen, and he was especially eager in the cause of female education. In the preface to one of hisworks, written with that object in view, he writes:— “I was born in the year 1814. While a pupil of the Páthshálá at home, I found my grandmother, mother, and aunts reading Bengali books. They could write in Bengali and keep accounts. There were no female schools then, nor were there suitable books for the females. My wife was very fond of reading, and I could scarcely supply her with instructive books. I was thus forced to think how female education could be promoted in a substantial way. The conclusion I came to was that, unless womanhood were placed on a spiritual basis, education would never be productive of real good. For the furtherance of this end I have been humbly working. ”
Amongst the books he published with this end in view are the ‘Ramaranjika,’ the ‘Abhedi,’ and the ‘Adhyátwiká.’ The ‘Ramaranjika’ deals with female education under different aspects, and gives examples drawn from the lives of eminent Englishwomen, as well as biographical sketches of distinguished Hindu women, drawn from history and tradition. Of the ‘Abhedi’ the author says:— “It is a spiritual novel in Bengali, in which the hero and heroine have been described as earnest seekers after the knowledge of the soul, and as obtaining spiritual light by the education of pain.” Of the ‘Adhyátwiká,’ the author tells us:— “It brings before its readers the conversation and manners of different classes of people, in different circumstances, which have been pourtrayed in different styles, and which may perhaps be useful to foreigners wishing to acquire a colloquial knowledge of the Bengali language.”
Babu Peary Chand Mitter was a man who keenly felt the evils in society around him, and he used his pen in the cause of temperance and the purity of thedomestic circle as against drunkenness and debauchery; amongst his writings having this object in view is the ‘Mada Kháoya bara dáya,’ or ‘The great evils of dram-drinking.’ It is a novel marked by great humour, and shows the author to have been a satirist of no mean power.
Besides these novels he wrote ‘The Life of David Hare’ both in Bengali and in English. He also contributed essays to The Calcutta Review, and an American publication called The Banner of Light, besides writing articles for the Agri-Horticultural Society of India.
Babu Peary Chand Mitter died in 1883.